Panetta Offers to ‘Educate’ Congress on Pentagon ‘Doomsday’ Cuts

By Tony Capaccio -
Aug 5, 2011

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
is telling Congress that the debt-reduction agreement President
Barack Obama signed into law this week includes a “doomsday
mechanism” that could lead to dangerous cuts in military
spending.

Speaking at his first Pentagon news conference yesterday,
Panetta focused on so-called sequestration, the procedure that
could force lawmakers on Capitol Hill to enact across-the-board
budget cuts if Congress rejects the recommendations for slashing
U.S. debt from a “super-committee” authorized by the new law.

“I and others here have a responsibility to really educate
the leadership on the Hill of the dangers if they allowed
sequestration to take place,” said Panetta, a former director
of the Office of Management and Budget and ex-chairman of the
House Budget Committee.

An automatic $500 billion in defense spending cuts could
result if the super-committee deadlocks or its proposals fail in
Congress. Panetta called the procedure a “kind of doomsday
mechanism” that could “result in a further round of very
dangerous cuts across the board.”

“I came into this job to fight and my intention is to
fight to make sure that, hopefully, some common sense prevails
here and that the committee does its work in looking” at other
areas of the budget, he said. Deep cuts “would do real damage
to our security, our troops and their families and our
military’s ability to protect the nation.”

Cutting and Withdrawing

Fighting the budget cuts is likely to preoccupy Panetta
during his first six months in office along with overseeing the
drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and possible commitment
of some U.S. personnel in Iraq after all 46,000 are supposed to
leave in December.

Pentagon officials are conducting a comprehensive review of
strategy, overhead and policy intended to determine how the
military implements what the Office of Management and Budget
yesterday said was about $330 billion in specific cuts.

Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen said the initial round of defense-spending reductions
were achievable. Mullen called them “fair and reasonable.”

The first installment of reductions represents about 7
percent of planned Pentagon spending through 2021. This is on
top of $78 billion the Obama administration last year forced the
Pentagon to absorb through 2016 in deficit reductions.

“I am confident we can meet the targets that we’ve been
given thus far,” Mullen said. “If those cuts were to double,”
he said, “that’s very dangerous for the country.”

Done It Before

“We are at the start of the fourth defense build-down we
have done since the Korean War,” said Clinton-era OMB defense
director Gordon Adams in an e-mail. “We have done it before and
we can do it again.”

Defense Department cuts could include a substantial
reduction in the military’s 1.43 million service members and
possibly eliminate subsidies for the Pentagon’s chain of
subsidized grocery stores.

Democrats say they will use the threat of automatic defense
cuts to prod Republicans to accept tax increases as part of the
$1.5 trillion debt-reduction deal -- or charge they would rather
protect the rich than the military.

Republicans said Obama and Democrats could end up showing
they are weak on defense if the military budget is slashed.

Robert Stallard, a defense analyst for RBC Capital Markets
LLC, said Panetta is sounding like his predecessor, Robert Gates, in seeking to protect most of the Pentagon’s programs.

Panetta’s “track record at CIA does not suggest he is a
‘hatchet man,’” Stallard said. Panetta previously headed the
Central Intelligence Agency.

Stallard, in a note to clients, said he doubts Congress’s
super-committee will succeed and there is “serious risk” the
automatic cuts will be triggered by a November deadline.